Yukiko Koshiro. Imperial Eclipse: Japan's Strategic Thinking about Continental Asia before August 1945.

Abstract

In Imperial Eclipse, Yukiko Koshiro argues that “[u]nder the US military occupation, the Pacific War narrative eclipsed Japan's Eurasian worldview and produced Japan's postwar amnesia about its colonial empire.” Aiming to “restore the comprehensive landscape of Japan's war,” Koshiro “returns the Soviet Union to the scene and renames the conflict the Eurasian-Pacific War” (p. 1). The book's central argument is that toward the end of the war, “Japanese war planners concluded that the Soviet Union had significant connections with regional nationalists that could help check US hegemonic ambitions in East Asia,” and “[t]hey hoped that Soviet presence in the region would achieve a desirable balance of power vacuum created by the fall of Japan's empire” (p. 2). The first two chapters suggest the forgotten yet substantial presence of Russians in Japan, and Japan's historical affinity to it. The following two chapters demonstrate that in the early stages of the war with China, Japanese military officers and diplomats were getting accurate information on the strength of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), its tensions with the USSR, and their respective influences in Korea. The next three chapters, on the process of ending the war, argue that these officers and bureaucrats knew that the USSR would eventually join the war and attack Japan.